Why You Need To Add Photos To Your Blog

With the growing popularity of Pinterest, the reason you need to add photos to your blog has become somewhat obvious. If you have high quality images in your blog with the ‘Pin It’ button, your entire post gets enviable publicity when someone (could be you) does pin it.

Psychologists often talk about getting in touch with our ‘Inner Child’. As children, we all loved picture books. Text was boring, images were fun. That part of our mind is still there – only, we cannot afford to indulge now that we are all grown up and business like. The basic reason why you need to add photos to your blog is such practice helps you connect to your viewers in the most primal way, through color, shape, design, and the unspoken word – or a ‘thousand words’ as WordPress never tires of pointing out.

When you have a relevant image inserted into your post, people tend to find the experience quite pleasing. Unless you have an extraordinarily engaging style of writing, only text is likely to appear academic (read boring, for most people), and the Internet is largely a magic box that we have grown addicted to. The element of fun must be there if you wish to make your average visitor stop and read. Why do you think doctor’s chambers and parlors have magazines? They could very well have classics or short stories instead!

Not everyone is an artist, but most people have a sense of aesthetics and respond to visuals if only by pausing for a moment. There will be visitors on your blog who will want to leave after a casual screening of your content. An array of images will make them stop and look. This will ultimately lower your bounce rate. A reputed site has a particularly sneaky yet pleasant trick to achieve this. In addition to having images in posts, when you move your mouse away from the page to close the tab or window, a slideshow pop up appears with ten amazing facts. Each of the slides contains very interesting images. The extra seconds that it takes to look at the images add to the overall visitor retention time for your blog.

Another reason why you need to add photos to your blog is the amount of publicity it can bring you when your posts are shared on social media sites like Facebook. Because of the reasons we have already covered, a link that displays a thumbnail with the text appears more enticing than one which has only text. There are blogs that have entire posts in images. The text that is in the images is also written in the “alt” attribute for SEO purposes, but imagine a post like ‘How to Get More Following on Twitter’ that is composed entirely of images, and funny ones at that. It would beat an all text article hands down any day!

Finally, there are some compelling statistics from the New York Times, Alexa, PR Newswire, Web Liquid, Skyword, Brightlocal and the National Retail Federation that should explain why you need to add photos to your blog.

1. Skyword reports that articles related to News, Sports and Politics get the most enhanced readership when images are present.

2. On an average, content with images get about 94% more page views than that without.

3. 60% of consumers are more impressed with search results that show images when searching for local businesses.

4. The National Retail Federation has found that consumers rate product images, product specific descriptions and customer reviews in that order when browsing e-commerce sites.

However, you need to follow best practices when using images on your blog. They must be optimized so as not to slow down the loading time. You can’t engage your visitors with images if they click away before they load. Also, bear in mind the “alt” attribute and use your primary keyword / keyword phrase relevant to the image. This will give you the added benefit of appearing in image search results as well.

And, having no image is probably better than putting up poor quality images. Either get a camera and acquire the basic image editing skills, or find professional quality photos from sites that provide stock images.

By now it should be adequately clear why you need to add photos to your blog, and the pun may be excused when we say that photos are a must because they clearly enhance your blog’s image!

About the guest author: Jason Smith is an online consultant for ABWE. Jason likes blogging about online strategies that are related to SEO, Content, PPC & Lead generation. In his free time he likes to study about web designing and practice Jiu Jitsu.